Temporal variability in moral value judgement

Alexandra Surdina, University of Warwick

Adam Sanborn, University of Warwick

Abstract

Moral judgments are known to change in response to changes in
external conditions. But how variable are moral judgments over time in the
absence of environmental variation? The moral domain has been described in terms
of five moral foundations, categories that appear to capture moral judgment
across cultures. We examined the temporal consistency of repeated responses to
the moral foundations questionnaire over short time periods, fitted a set of
mixed effects models to the data and compared them. We found correlations between
changes in participant responses for different foundations over time, suggesting
a structure with at least two underlying stochastic processes: one for moral
judgments involving harm and fairness, and another for moral judgments related to
loyalty, authority, and purity.